Once or twice when he had shut the door and gone out, and the great house seemed settled into silence, she lay back on her couch and cried a little. She was very homesick, A dreadful lassitude took possession of her, and she began to feel afraid. Horatia was not used to illness. On the few occasions when she had had a sore throat or some such slight indisposition, the Rector had read to her by the hour, and enquiries would come twice a day from Tristram, accompanied by flowers or grapes or the latest "Edinburgh Review" which he had ridden into Oxford to fetch for her. All this attention she had then taken for granted, almost as her due, and now that she could not longer command it she seemed to herself but a poor creature after all, for she had come to have only one conscious wish, that some one should take care of her and understand. It was not that these new relatives were not considerate, but that their solicitude seemed to spring from a different source, and sometimes it almost irritated her. She felt as if she were in a palace, stifled by the precautions taken to ensure the safe entrance into the world of an heir apparent.

But at the worst she found always a spring of secret joy, and this was in itself a surprise. Before her marriage she had never been able to analyse her feelings about children. Just as she had supposed that in some distant future she would marry (in spite of her protestations to the contrary) so also she imagined that she would have children of her own. But that she should ardently desire to hold her own child in her arms was an astonishment. In the picture she had made of him he was never a very small baby. He appeared to her always as a child of eighteen months or two years, and he had red-gold curls and grey eyes. It was only after some time that she realised she was thinking of a miniature of herself which hung in her father's bedroom. It had never so much as occurred to her that Maurice might be like Armand. For as she had settled that the child would be a boy, so had she fixed upon the English form of his name, by which she meant always to call him. He would of course have a string of French names; she had heard them several times: Maurice after his father, whose second name it was (and fortunately Maurice was an English name as well, though her English pronunciation of it would probably give offence), and Stanislas after the Duc, and Victor after the Dowager (suppose he should be like the Dowager!), and Etienne after her own father, and Marie, or Anne, or Elisabeth, she had forgotten which, and probably Charles after the dethroned monarch.

Almost every day now mysterious cases and parcels arrived, addressed to her and bearing an English postmark; a bath, painted on the outside with a design of blue loops and knots, had recently found its way into the Hôtel. In a fortnight an English nurse was expected, chosen by Aunt Julia, and she would have plenty of time to become accustomed to the ways of the house before her services would be needed. The married ladies of the family made their own comments when they heard that all the babyclothes which Horatia had not made herself had been sent direct from England, and there was much hostile criticism on the proposed addition of an English nurse to the household. However, Armand had let it be known that his wife should not be thwarted, and as she did not trouble him about arrangements he was only too glad for her to amuse herself in such a harmless fashion. The nurseries had been decorated by a well-known Paris firm, and Horatia was pleased with the cream panelling of the walls, and the cream curtains with their sprays of pink roses caught up with pale blue ribbons, and lined with deep rose pink to give a warm glow to the room.

The day that the painters and decorators left she had a sudden idea. There was in her boudoir a copy in oils of that beautiful Madonna of Raphael's, which Ferdinand III of Tuscany, discovering in a peasant's cottage, so loved that it hung always over his bed. Some privileged person apparently had obtained permission to have it copied; the copy had somehow found its way to a dealer's, and the Duc de la Roche-Guyon, on an Italian tour, had bought it and presented it to his wife, Armand's mother. It had made little appeal to Horatia at first, but of late she had come to love it, congratulating herself on being able to discriminate between the natural beauty of this picture of a mother and her child, and its superstitious associations. Her fancy now was to have the work of art, in its heavy Florentine frame, removed from her sitting-room and hung over the mantelpiece in the day nursery. In these rather unusual surroundings it could reign alone, and later on it would be company for her and Maurice.

The order was executed by rather bewildered servants, who secretly wondered what Madame la Comtesse would command to be done next, and Horatia, in the growing dusk, went to look at the effect. The result was beyond her expectations.

She sat down and gazed for a long time at the simplicity, purity, and calm of the fair face. Suddenly she bent forward, and, hardly knowing what she was doing, held out her arms to it with an indescribable gesture at once of entreaty and of offering, and then as suddenly leant back in her chair, and covering her face with her hands began to cry. She was terribly lonely. But it was not for long now. It was not for long that she would hold out empty arms....

(4)

The next day it rained in torrents from an early hour, the persistent rain of autumn. Armand was away, but this was nothing unusual. The post brought her no fresh parcels, and it was too wet to go out driving, and her boudoir without the familiar picture seemed forlorn. Seeking for a diversion she told Martha to light the fire in the nursery.

"Yes, certainly, my lady," responded Mrs. Kemblet, delighted, "and perhaps you would like to count through the things Polly sent over yesterday, and there is the christening robe to be put away."

"Of course, I had forgotten," said Horatia. "We will be very busy, and pretend we are at home in England."